Scott Nesbitt’s Plain Text Project is one of my go-to sites I check every day. Nesbitt also has a couple of other places where you can find him on the web. Every Monday he puts out his Monday Kickoff which is a collection of nine interesting articles. That’s where I found this gem of an article about a man who is creating an internet for the post-apocalypse. He calls his system “the Reticulum Network Stack” and it’s “designed to exist alongside or on top of the traditional internet.
The developer Mark Qvist envisions Reticulum to be “a streamlined communications tool that can be quickly deployed in the case of systemic telecom failure, with minimal lift and a heavy focus on encryption and privacy. All of it is built on the back of an entirely new protocol that aims to be more resilient than IP, or Internet Protocol, which is a set of software rules that govern the flow of information on the internet.
I’ve had a passing interest for a while in alternatives to the world wide web. I’ve looked at Gopher and also Gemini which addresses some of the shortcomings in Gopher. I’ve even tracked Cuba’s homegrown internet protocol:
- Cuba’s Illegal Underground Internet Is Thriving
- Israeli Data Explains Why Pfizer Excluded Vaccinated People from Trials
- Inside Cuba’s D.I.Y. Internet Revolution
- Inside Cuba’s secretive underground gamer network – Evolved from gamer network, to social community
- In Cuba, gamers lament what they see as the end of the island’s underground network
- Cuba’s Internet Is F*cking Insane. And the Ways Cubans Use It Are Genius.
All very interesting. I’ve got a million things going on right now but I would love to try and get Reticulum up and running. I’d like to see if it as simple as Qvist is try to make it.
The Philosophical Apprentice 